Kurahashi( core) playing for the La Verne Leopards. Photo courtesy of Bailey Kurahashi.

All in all, on the afternoon of Jan. 24, Kurahashi nailed 11 three-pointers for the La Verne Leopards women’s squad at the University of La Verne, near Los Angeles. Kurahashi defined a new school record that day for three-pointers reached in a single competition. And with her scorching-hot side, she left onlookers astonished.

But her rendition wasn’t perfectly surprising.

Like thousands in the L.A. metro domain, Kurahashi had honed her talents for years in Japanese-American basketball leagues.

She was young when she got started — 4, to be precise. And it was in those early years that she got some of her most important training.

It’s a chassis of training that’s extended many tournament musicians to college basketball teams. Japanese-American leagues even cured launch Natalie Nakase, a onetime UCLA player who later sufficed as an auxiliary tutor for the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers.

The JA organizations, as insiders call them, are impressive for their sheer sizing: One estimate is that some 14, 000 Japanese-Americans currently represent in Southern California leagues. It’s common knowledge that everyone in the regional Japanese-American community has some connection to JA organization — either they’ve frisked or they have a friend or family member who’s played.

Kids and adults represented Western plays like baseball, football, and basketball and too Japanese martial art like judo. These athletics were at once an emotional flee from captivity and a mode to bond.

After the crusade intention and the cliques were closed, that gift resumed, and Japanese-Americans began building the regional athletics conferences that continue today.

This society, also known as the JAO, has grown into the largest basketball league for Japanese-American youth in the Los Angeles neighborhood . strong> More than a thousand girls currently play in JAO-organized activities, according to Leland Lau, the organization’s commissioner.

Girls as young as kindergartners can play in JAO games. Units are grouped under age, and the tournaments run year-round — all of which provides daughters like Kurahashi times to rehearse the sport.

And with so many senilities playing ball, the boast has become a regular dinner-table exchange in Kurahashi’s house.

It’s the experience of so many Japanese-Americans: Basketball isn’t exactly video games but a racial tradition that status a part of history of grief and, eventually, triumph over abuse.

For decades, Japanese-Americans were excluded from mainstream U.S. life — including from athletics. And so they stripped together. They worded their own conferences. They frisked ball.

Yet through its first year, as the bigotry began to wane and Japanese-Americans gained more following, the aged heritage persisted. It didn’t evaporate into the American melting pot because it helps Japanese-Americans seem connected to each other as well as to their heritage . strong>

For Kurahashi, thinking back on her time in the JA leagues and all the friends she made, that’s pretty powerful.

“It’s a sense of togetherness. It reaches you pleasant, ” she says. “It’s a situate where we’re all the same, it’s a plaza where we can all connect.”